Q&A: Ilan Berman on Iran, the Knesset and the Haredi Draft

The news from Israel this morning was of yet another narrowly averted crisis: the threatened collapse of the governing coalition over attempts by the Knesset to put teeth in a bill that would compel Haredi participation in the IDF. The Haredi draft has been a long-running issue in Israeli politics, but yesterday many observers thought the level of additional stress brought on by the Gaza war might finally bring matters to the point of no return. 

By morning the sides had backed down, citing a compromise with as-yet-unspecified details, and the possibility of new elections had receded, only to be replaced by fears of yet another looming collapse of the status quo:  broad hints that Israel might move to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, with or without U.S. approval. On this issue, too, the path up to the very edge of the precipice is well-worn (as are the paths by which both sides have generally backed away at the last minute). Will this time be different? What signs should we watch for? I put these questions to Ilan Berman, senior vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council and a frequent contributor to Moment.

You just returned from Israel. Did it feel to you as if the Haredi draft issue is at a boiling point, and how does it compare to the million other times we’ve seen this dynamic play out? 

What I heard a lot when I was in Israel was, we’re stuck. We’re stuck in Gaza because of the plodding pace of the conflict, and this has strained the capacity of the Israeli military—which is a conscript army oriented towards short, decisive conflicts and one that relies heavily on its reserve force. These are folks who are past draft age, who come back and serve, say, one weekend a month until they’re 40. Now reservists are being called up en masse. This is creating massive dislocation in the national economy, it’s causing inflation, and it’s disrupting the family life of reservists. 

Against that backdrop you have a minority, the Haredim, that is growing in terms of population percentage and that the majority thinks isn’t contributing, or at least isn’t contributing as much as the rest of the country. It’s a huge open wound in terms of societal cohesion. The rift was worse than I’ve ever seen it, and my sense is that this rift only gets deeper and wider the longer the conflict goes on.

What’s your sense of where things are right now?

The Haredi draft issue has become a political football for the Israeli government, because the far-right coalition of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is composed, to a significant degree, of religious parties committed to shielding their community members from being drafted by the IDF. So even though the government is being told by the military that it needs more troops, the issue keeps getting tossed around, and has once again landed in the courts. The courts have said that they’re going to start issuing large-scale call-up notices, and they’re going to start enforcing them, which is a separate and controversial issue.

They’ve done this a couple of times, right? 

Correct, but they haven’t really enforced it yet. In the last go-round they issued something like 10,000 summonses, and only 800 or so people showed up. 

But more recently Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara has been threatening to actually enforce adherence, that people who are essentially truants would be forcibly conscripted. This creates a tremendous amount of political havoc inside the house, so to speak, because the Orthodox parties within the ruling coalition, such as United Torah Judaism, said that if this was enforced, they were going to bolt. If that had happened, Netanyahu’s coalition would have fallen below the 61-seat majority that it needs in order to retain power. And so what we saw yesterday was a desperate series of compromises.

A really interesting wrinkle in the whole Haredi draft debate is the fact that the highest proportion serving in the IDF are Modern Orthodox men and women, who are devout but also patriotic.

Right now these religious parties have disproportionate weight in the political system compared to the proportion of seats that they command in the Knesset. And so this was a very risky play for them to make, because under any conceivable circumstance, if the coalition were to fall apart, they would lose political clout, and they could be shut out of the ruling coalition next time altogether. So for them to make the effort is an indicator of how deep this fissure now runs in Israeli society.

That sounds as if they had an interest in compromise no less than Netanyahu. Is that correct?

I would argue yes, because politics is the art of the possible, and there is a compromise to be struck here. Especially because if you talk to Israeli military officials, they’ll tell you that large-scale absorption of Haredi youth isn’t in the cards in the immediate future. There simply aren’t the proper units for it, the proper levels of kashrut, the proper segregation of men and women. And so there is work to be done internally in the IDF in order to absorb this population. And, by the way, the population that we’re talking about, something like 60,000 Haredim right now who are eligible for conscription but have elected not to be conscripted, or have been told by their religious leaders not to be conscripted, is actually more than the IDF needs. The IDF has a shortfall of about 10,000 to 12,000, so there is a compromise to be struck, for sure. 

My sense is that Netanyahu is really stuck between a rock and a hard place, because I think he understands very well, better than most, frankly, what is needed for something resembling a decisive victory in Gaza, and that requires a surge of personnel. And because the Gaza campaign currently is open-ended, the question arises, is there going to be a protracted period of military rule that’s going to require yet more additional personnel? So I’m not at all sure that he thinks what he’s articulating with such confidence in public is feasible unless there are more men and women under arms. 

Netanyahu has capitulated time and again to the religious elements of his coalition in order to keep the coalition together, but he has paid for it in terms of his national popularity. His popularity in Israel is very low. He is saved, at least so far, by the fact that there’s no near peer. There are lots of contenders for the throne. But there’s really no replacement candidate that people can rally around. I’m not sure that’s a permanent condition, and so he has to tread really carefully here.

A really interesting wrinkle in the whole Haredi draft debate is the fact that the highest proportion serving in the IDF are Modern Orthodox men and women, who are devout but also patriotic and have a commitment to the nation state. Those who are refusing to enlist make up a comparatively very small minority who disapprove of Zionism as a nation formation tool. They see biblical roots to the nation, but they also see prayer and spiritual armor as being as important as actual armor.

In other words, they think they’re already fighting for the nation in their own way?

Right. And by the way, they can be forgiven for thinking that, because at the founding of the state they were told that this was the case. I would argue, hindsight being what it is, that this was a mistake, but it was a mistake made when the Haredi community was necessary for the Jewish spirit of the country; it was a much smaller proportion, so it wasn’t seen as being a risky play to give them all these allowances.

I’ve seen commentary aimed at the ultra-Orthodox by people who are trying to persuade them, and it sometimes takes the form of, “Look at the Modern Orthodox. Look at the National Religious. Why can’t you do it the way they’re doing it? They serve.”

For the Modern Orthodox/National Religious, it’s very seamless. You see this when you travel in Israel. On a train, you might see a young woman in a soldier’s uniform praying; they very seamlessly combine service to the state and service to God. Where the country runs into trouble is if one is prejudiced against the other, and that’s the cleavage that we’re seeing. And again, it doesn’t cut both ways equally. Because if you go to Tel Aviv, you see lots of secular Tel Avivis who do not pray, and who don’t keep Shabbat, and they’re still patriotic Zionists. But if you go up to the north of Israel, if you go up to Tzfat [Safed], that’s a Haredi city, where something like 70 percent of the population is on some form of government assistance. They’re getting remittances from the government because they’re engaged in Torah study.

And Tzfat is also the staging ground for Israel’s northern command, the military command that oversees the Golan. And so you can imagine the cognitive dissonance when 18- and 19-year-old secular Tel Avivis go up to the North and see people they are forced to defend but for whom they have nothing but contempt. They see them as free riders on the system. Rightly or wrongly, they’re not participating the same way these soldiers are participating. So my sense is that it becomes harder and harder to ignore, when there is a sense of injustice, broadly speaking.  Because the country’s bleeding, there’s this open chest wound of the hostages, and this seems like another inequality that’s really being thrown in their face.

You mentioned earlier that Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara had made some rulings on the Haredi draft. Was Netanyahu’s move to remove her also part of this deadlock?  

I think that’s part of this running gun battle that Netanyahu’s had for a couple of years now. And frankly, detractors would say that the judicial reform effort to rebalance and trim the power of the court created so much social tension that it gave Hamas crazy ideas that Israeli society was weak and so riven with division that it was the time to strike. But set that to one side, and it’s very clear that it has been a project of the ruling coalition in Israel to, for lack of a better term, right-size the Israeli judiciary branch. From the conservative perspective, the judicial reform was intended to right-size an overwhelmingly liberal judicial branch and Supreme Court. On the other side, the view is that the Israeli government is trying to put political priorities above judicial checks and balances, trying to eliminate the independence of the Supreme Court, of the attorney general, of the head of the Shin Bet, and so forth, as a way of essentially having a super-empowered executive and subordinating the other branches of government that would, in the absence of a constitution, provide checks and balances and serve as a meaningful restraint on executive power. As with all things, the truth probably lies in the middle. But because all of this is being reignited against the backdrop of a conflict being fought by an overstretched military and a lack of social cohesion, of great stress on Israel’s international relations based upon what it is doing in Gaza, this is all being amplified. 

There’s also another nagging issue which I think plays into this. Some officials since October 7 have at least said the right things, claimed responsibility for intelligence failures that led up to the massacre. But nobody’s really resigned. And so the public is left craving some level of accountability.

I understand when military generals and elected officials say, “We can’t resign, because it’s wartime, it’s a crisis,” or whatever, but that need for some sort of justice is still there, and you can feel it in the Israeli street, and it’s turbo-charging all of this.

Israel is being used by Washington as a sort of stalking horse to say, “Hey, listen, Iran. Make a deal, or we’ll unleash the hounds,” and it’s not at all clear what Israel is prepared to do.

What should we be watching for in this latest round of overlapping crises? 

A couple of years ago, the last time the government fell, I was in the Knesset building. I was sitting with a member of the Knesset, and she turned to me and said, “I guess we’re done.” I asked her what she meant, and she said, “Well, when the coalition falls, the Knesset no longer has to work. It’s barred by law from passing new laws.” When the coalition falls, members of the Knesset just go home. 

So what you actually get, if the governing coalition falls—this won’t happen now for awhile, but it could still happen at some point in the future—is a period between the government falling and elections being called and the new government being installed, in which you actually do have a super-empowered executive, not on everything, but on, for example, foreign affairs. Of course, this didn’t happen yesterday, but the possibility arose against the backdrop of a very decisive time in the U.S./Iranian relationship, in terms of negotiations, in which Israel is the free agent. Israel is being used by Washington as a sort of stalking horse to say, “Hey, listen, Iran. Make a deal, or we’ll unleash the hounds,” and it’s not at all clear what Israel is prepared to do. 

Until recently, it’s been taken for granted that Israel isn’t prepared to do anything if the United States tells it not to. But it does strike me that Netanyahu right now has a pretty stark choice. He’s getting older. He may win another term in office, or this may be his swan song. If it is his swan song, he leaves the political scene as either the man who presided over the greatest slaughter of the Jews since the Holocaust or as the man who eliminated the greatest threat to the Jewish state since the Third Reich. And that seems like a pretty easy choice.

As always, the devil is in the details, but to me, that’s the thing to watch. 

And by the way, let’s say that we do enter this zone of crisis with Iran, and Israel does carry out some sort of some form of military action. That fundamentally resets Netanyahu’s popularity. Because something like 80 percent of Israelis—left, right, center—believe that Iran is an existential threat, and most of them support military action. 

Of course, politically, where you stand is where you sit. So if you don’t like Bibi, you won’t think he has the independent will to carry this out. If you like Bibi, you’ll probably say, “Yes, he’s going to be decisive. He’s going to attack Iran again.”

I think the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. But historically, if you look at the way he’s behaved, he knows firsthand what happens when you have unintended political consequences. So I don’t think he’s angling for the government to fall, at this point or at any point in the near future, but I don’t think that he would become a nonentity if the government did fall.

What’s the role of U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee in all this? 

Huckabee’s position is interesting, and it’s more of a comment on American politics than anything else. Trump 47 is totally different from Trump 45. In that first term, there was a lot of chaos, as there is now, but one of the hallmarks then was that you could be on the team and still criticize the team.

That’s not the case now. You see a lot of these iterative purges that are going through the National Security Council and the State Department. It’s very clear that they’re stripping out folks who think differently.

And I wonder what that does for Huckabee, because Huckabee is very, very Zionist. He’s a very good ambassadorial pick, but he was picked before the president decided to embark upon this diplomatic process with the Iranians. I was taught in law school that you should never ask a question to which you do not know the answer, and we’re doing just that in the Iranian negotiations. Our expectation is that the Iranians are not going to meaningfully give up their nuclear program. But what happens if they say, “Okay, well, we’re not going to give it up, but we’re going to delay it in a way that’s acceptable for Washington, but not acceptable for Jerusalem”? What does that do for the bilateral relationship between the United States and Israel?

Apropos of that, what was the level of buyer’s remorse about Trump among Israelis, when you were there?

The week I was there is not necessarily indicative, because I arrived a day before the Houthis struck Ben Gurion Airport on May 4 and left not long after Trump struck a side deal with the Houthis for them not to bomb American vessels, and so there was a lot of anger at that. 

Generally, it’s difficult to come down from a political high, and a lot of the Israelis I spoke with after Trump was reelected in November of 2024 were in near euphoria:  “We have our guy back; he’s going to let us do whatever we want. We just decapitated Hezbollah, and we’ve popped the lid off of the Iranian air defense architecture—we have our mojo back.” And now you have a situation where the United States has given Israel a bit of leash on Gaza, but that leash is tightening. Already America is engaged in negotiations with Iran that may rebound to Israel’s great detriment, and America has preemptively removed sanctions on Syria, even though that country’s new president was a jihadist five minutes ago. So there are a lot of things for Israelis to look at and ask, “What gives?” So I think there’s definitely a degree of buyer’s remorse.